Bloat for me is features that get in your way; the kinds of features that slow you down because you can't ignore them or turn them off. Frankly, you could say that any "big" program, such as Photoshop or Word, is bloated, but I don't hear that criticism much any more, because the code has been streamlined and they really aren't that slow. (And fast processors all around keep them from being slow as well.)

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Maybe one problem here is that there are two kinds of music player :
1) Winamp like : user organise his files as he wishes at the folder/files level
2) iTunes like : the software manage the music files for you

I used to be a winamp user back in the days when me and all my friends would listen to the same 50 or so mp3 we managed to gather through LAN party. Encoding a CD would take 2 days on a pentium II ... My mp3 folder grew and grew through mp3 exchange, pirating etc ... and half of my 9087876987 mp3 would not be named/taged correctly.

Nowaday I have a job and I pay for my music instead of pirating it . I like my mp3 to have correct names etc .. but I hate to manage them myself. So I started to buy music on iTunes wich was the first convenient online music store and let it manage the files for me.
Now I use it out of habit. itunes is part of the app that are always on, so I don't care if it takes 15 sec to load (actually i don't know how fast it loads). I only use it to play music, I don't even do custom playlist.
Recently, my GF and I started to buy TV shows on itunes too. And we had a lot of problems while downloading the videos : slow download, server pretend that the file doesn't exists ... etc I would kill to have a good VoD service with tv shows and movies with subtitles and original soundtrack. (we can get some on itunes but not much - we are french)

One exemple of bloated software in the itune category is Amarok for linux.

I see, bloat is a subset of bad usability.

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Bad usability? You mean if the program is not easily usable? If that's what you mean, then, yes. I'm not bothered by the many features of Word that I don't use (but I'm happy to have some of the less common ones that are very useful to me).

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I think CarlJung is saying that what you think of as bloat is actually a sign of bad usability.

I don't consider that the same thing as bloat. A program can be fast & use very few resources (not bloated) but have an awful UI. Many command line programs are examples of this.

I don't see a bad UI as bloat; that's just a bad UI. However, if features get in the way of features - for example, Windows constantly asking you if you're sure you really, truly want to do something - that's a kind of combination of bloat and bad usability.

So how do you define bloat? That's part of the point of my question. Lots of Windows users claim that iTunes is bloated (Mac users don't seem to say this). Many of them, as I see often on forums and mailing lists, toss around that word but it seems that many people see it as having different meanings. And, so far, on my blog post, with a few dozen comments, no one has been able to say what they mean by it. Several people have said, "Yea, it's bloated," but I expressly asked why they say this, and no one has answered. (The only reason that comes close to being valid is the size of the download; If it's really big, that can be an annoyance. However, on Windows, this is 93 MB, which, frankly, is no big deal.)

I won't deny that iTunes is complex, that it does a lot of stuff. But does that make a program "bloated"? Frankly, I'm not sure this word even has a good meaning (I think the Wikipedia article is outdated, frankly, because processor power is no longer an issue, and, for most users with recent computers, RAM is not an issue either.)

Trying to think of which programs I have that are bloated, the only candidates on my Mac are Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. But none of those programs have features that get in the way of others. I've never used mail merge in Word, but so what? Its existence doesn't bother me or slow me down. I only use Photoshop for a handful of actions, and couldn't care less about managing color profiles, for example, but that doesn't change the program.

So I'm still scratching my head here, trying to understand what people mean when they say this...

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Rather than use your own definition, I think it would be more useful to use a generally accepted definition.

Personally, I think that bloat is in the difference between what users expect and what they get. If a program has a million features you never use, you consider it bloated. So a program that is considered bloated by one user will not be considered bloated by another.

If you expect iTunes to be a simple music player (like Winamp), you consider it bloated. If you expect Photoshop to be a simple drawing program (like Paint), then you consider it bloated. If you expect Word to be a simple text editor (like Notepad), then you consider it bloated.

If you're writing an article about it, then you should probably consider what the average user expects. If the opinion is widely held that iTunes is bloated, then it probably has more features than the average user expects. It might be interesting to identify what those features are, and what people were expecting. I don't use it, so I wouldn't know.

I basically agree with the definition given in the Wikipedia article. Bloated software takes more resources than necessary (RAM, disk space, processor time), contains many features that aren't required for it's primary purpose and are unused by most people.

I think that for several major versions now iTunes certainly meets these criteria for bloat, especially on Windows.

* Even on the Mac OS it uses a large amount of RAM (real, not just virtual) just sitting idle in the background. Right now on my system (10.6.3) it's using nearly 300MB while doing nothing.

* In recent years more and more non-music functionality has been crammed into iTunes, mostly to support the iTMS & various iDevices.

For Apple, who often claim to be proud of simplifying systems, to do this is really sad. This trend began around the time they moved non-music data syncing from iSync into iTunes. Even the app's name "iTunes" makes no real sense anymore. If they want to keep all this stuff in one app it ought to be called something like "iMedia".

Software bloat often causes poor performance, but even when it doesn't (due to great HW) it's still bloated.

The bottom line is that even amongst Mac users iTunes isn't loved anymore, but tolerated as necessary to make full use of the various iDevices.

Yes, that's a good point. But what do users expect? In the case of iTunes, they know it manages music, provides access to a store, and manages other types of media, as well as syncing content to iPods and other devices. In my experience, most users don't know about many of the functions in iTunes, as they don't know about a lot of what's in other programs. So, again, the question is, why is that a big deal?

In any case, one of the main points of my article is to show users how to streamline the interface so they don't have to see the things that don't interest them. While that doesn't change what's under the hood, it can change user perception.

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Well, you say something interesting. Because you don't understand how the Mac OS uses RAM. When Activity Monitor shows you that a program is "using" a certain amount of Real Memory, that doesn't mean that memory is locked down. Mac OS X - and I'd guess recent versions of Windows - have dynamic memory usage that lets other programs access memory when needed. Those numbers, at least for Mac OS X, are generally considered by developers to be nothing more than indicative. You can see this by launching something that really uses a lot of RAM, right away. You'll see that the Real Mem column in Activity Monitor will change, and decrease a lot for the other programs. Granted, in years past, memory was locked, but this is no longer the case.

Processor time, however, would be a valid issue. And there's a bug in iTunes that's quite odd; if you play a song, it uses a small amount of processor time, depending on the file format, etc. But if you click the > icon in the display at the top of the window, to show the thing that looks a bit like an equalizer (I don't know what that's called, actually), CPU usage increases, and it seemingly depends on how many of the little bars are displayed. However, CPU time is not an all or nothing criterion; iTunes uses as much CPU time as it can on my Mac when I rip CDs; other music or video conversion programs do the same. Bloat for me, regarding CPU time, would be, say, if Microsoft Word used 75% of CPU time when, say, spell checking.

As for the question of name, it's become a brand, so that won't be changed, even if it starts offering a pizza delivery service. That's a non-issue in my opinion.

As to the increase in features, that's part of the growth of the program. Would you really rather have to use two programs to sync an iPod? I think the syncing is relatively streamlined; there's lots of tabs, and lots of options, but you generally only set them once. The thing is, again we come to the issue of, if you don't use these features, why do you care? If that's the criteria for "bloat" then it's an outdated concept, which really goes back to the days when software was totally resident in RAM, when there was no virtual memory, and when you would have to quit one program because you needed to free up RAM to use another. On the Mac, it's been ten years since these issues were valid; even on Windows XP, the version I use, I've only seen a low memory warning come up once in all the years I've used it (albeit rarely).

(I remember, back with OS 9 and earlier, you could choose how much RAM a program used, and when launched the program would access and lock all that RAM. And I recall that this was an issue back then, notably with Microsoft Word, which needed a lot of RAM to work with large documents.)

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Just as an example, 15 years ago, Word ran on an Intel 80486 DX/2-66 with 4 MB of RAM.

What functionality has been added that warrants a 30-fold increase in required processing power and a 100-fold increase in memory consumption?

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That's certainly a valid question. And it ran just as fast back then. Granted - Word is a good example, because I've been using it professionally for a long time - it didn't have change tracking, the links to other Office files, spell checking (at least not live spell checking), the ability to handle large graphics, charts, etc. But it does make one wonder; how much work is really done streamlining applications like that as they evolve?

To be fair, it doesn't need 100 times as much RAM; your computer in general may, because of the OS, but not Word. I think Word runs in less than 200 MB on my Mac, unless it's using very big, complex documents. So that's only a 50-fold increase. As I said in my post above, though, modern memory management systems are more flexible than they were back in the day, so that's almost a moot point.

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Wow Kirk, I'm going to address these points & then bail from this thread.

1. Actually I do know quite a lot about how memory management works on modern computer systems. Just the fact that I specifically quoted the real memory usage & not the virtual memory usage should have clued you into that. I'm not going to discuss this topic here other that to say that I didn't claim the memory was "locked down". I cited the real memory usage to illustrate the fact that iTunes is bloated in part because it's inefficient in its memory usage.

2. That thing is called a spectrum analyzer.

3. Names can always be changed. The change to iOS from iPhone OS, and indeed Apple's own name change a few years ago are examples of this.

4. No I don't want to use 2 programs to sync an iDevice. I'd prefer the sync to be done by 1 program, you know, like iSync. I'd also prefer iTunes to just handle audio. (music, audiobooks, etc.) All other stuff, movies, tv shows, books (non-audio) should be dealt with elsewhere. Part of being a non-bloated app is a focus on core functionality, something that Apple is normally quite good at.

5. OS 9 (and 8) were embarrassingly bad at memory management (and multitasking). The idea that a user would have to micro-manage memory allocation per app in the late 1990s was beyond silly.

I don't see iTunes as being an more "inefficient" in memory usage than other programs. I see a number of programs that show high real memory figures without this causing any issues.

As for the name, that's really not an issue in judging a program. Is Microsoft Word wrongly named because it can handle graphics?

As for the different types of content, ie non-audio, as you say, why have another program if you're also going to be syncing them to an iPod, Apple TV, or whatever?

Point 5: indeed. It was very frustrating, especially with Word, at the time.

To sum up, as this thread really isn't going anyplace, my query has told me the following: one person here has a computer that's somewhat old and not enough RAM, and because of that, iTunes is bloated. On my blog, people have commented on the size of downloads (for Windows), hence iTunes is bloated.

The closest I've been able to come to a real, valid reason is the presence of features that people don't need (or the fact that iTunes, despite its name, handles more than music). I find it hard to criticize any software for excess features these days, and I wonder why "iTunes is bloated" has become a meme, whereas "Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Photoshop/Dreamweaver/Illustrator is bloated" has not. Heck, my FTP program has features I never use; does that make it bloated? Even my Terminal app has features I don't use... Heck, this forum has tons of features and options I don't use either...

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First of all, please stop telling people that they don't know what they are talking about. It's insulting and probably a large factor why you face so heavy resistance in many threads. Even in cases when you are right, it doesn't stop being insulting.

Secondly, you can't dismiss a large memory footprint by mentioning swapping memory to disc. Writing to disc is a real performance killer, it's order of magnitudes slower than writing to RAM. When an application needs a lot of RAM and all is already consumed by other applications the OS have no option but to write out memory from a currently not active application to disc so it can fit the new application in RAM. But once you switch back to those applications, the memory needs to be read back from disc. Again, taking a performance hit.

Swapping to disc is a fantastic way to stretch the memory beyond it's limits, but it comes with a performance penalty. Writing memory efficient applications still matter. If the swapping gets in the way by bringing down performance, bloat is an appropriate way to label it.

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Kirk, if it's not possible for iTunes to be bloated, which is what you seem to be suggesting so far, why are you asking the question? It's like a theist asking 'Does God exist?' Rhetorical questions have their place but not as starting points for genuine inquiry.

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I'm asking why people have that impression; what is it that convinces them that a program is bloated. I could have asked the same about other programs, such as those I mentioned above.

It's not at all like asking "does god exist" but rather why people feel that this program is daunting. And, as I said above, the only clue I've gotten so far is that it's the extent of the program's feature set that makes people feel this way. Whether or not one defines that as bloat depends on each person (I, for one, don't, as I've said several times in this thread, either for iTunes, or for other programs.) I think a lot of this feeling comes from how software used to work, years ago, when computers were much slower, and "bloated" programs did indeed run slowly. Heck, I remember when it took Word 30-45 seconds just to launch on a Mac...

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Oh, no, it's not about swapping. On Mac OS X, programs will "hold on" to memory when they need it, then let it go when they don't. Only if they're doing something where they actively need the memory will they need to swap. So iTunes taking up 300 MB, as in imabuddha's case, (right now, it's at 249 MB for me, as I listen to music with a very large library), means nothing. It doesn't mean that memory is locked, frozen or anything, and, unless the app is actively doing a lot, there will be no swapping. Granted, if your computer doesn't have enough RAM - as in Ross's case - then you will have a lot of swapping. But Ross is running an old computer with less RAM than what the OS requires, so I think his case is not a good example.

One other point - which may be a particularity of Mac OS X, since I don't know a lot about how Windows manages memory - is that one my Mac mini, which has 4 GB RAM, iTunes, and any other program (Mail, Safari, etc.) use much more real memory than on my MacBook Air which only has 2 GB. So the total amount of memory has an effect on the amount of memory an app will claim, even though, from what developers have told me, that memory is not being used. (I had to deal with this issue when reviewing a program that seemed to take a lot of memory; I found out that these figures are at best indicative, but don't really reflect actual usage.)

I certainly agree, however, that a program that _holds onto_ a lot of memory, which will lead to swapping, would be a good candidate for the word "bloat".

BTW, again, just to reiterate, I don't know how Windows handles memory. When people have said that iTunes uses a lot of "system resources" - ie, memory - does this correspond to a real figure of resident memory that is not available to other programs? This may, of course, depend on different versions of Windows; I would assume that more recent versions have better memory management than, say, XP.

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That sounds... different. Can anyone point me to more info about how this works?

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Well, there's this, that gives an overview:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 3140025184

(This is rather old, but the basics are the same.)

I didn't find anything else quickly, other than some much more technical stuff on Apple's Developer website.

The key here is "inactive memory" which is that which shows as Real Memory but which isn't being used. If I look at my Mac's memory right now, I get, out of 4 GB RAM, 883 MB Wired (that is, which can't be dumped from RAM); 2.11 GB active (ie, being used by different apps and processes); and 545 MB inactive. The latter number is the most interesting, because that's where there's a lot of flexibility. There is no end-user tool, however, for seeing this breakdown per app (there are developer tools, but I don't know which ones provide this).

If I run top for iTunes, I get this:

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #POR #MREG RPRVT RSHR RSIZE VPRVT
876- iTunes 10.3 72:53.09 24/1 2 459 3249 178M 70M 252M+ 253M

So the resident private part is 178 MB, out of the total of 252. But that figure is as dynamic as the rest; it can change when needed.

But in general, on Mac OS X, memory is very fluid, and one really doesn't need to worry about it, unless you're really in a low-RAM situation (as in Ross's case) or are using high-RAM apps, such as, say, video editing tools, etc. So the RAM usage of pretty much any program is not an issue. It's worth noting that when I review software for Macworld, or when others review software (again, other than pro apps), this is not something we ever comment on. I'm not using the latest, fastest Mac, and the only program I know of that really hit my RAM - aside from VMware and Windows - is a voice recognition program. I've never had issue with anything else.

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